In a computer system serving media assets to multiple users, such as a server farm having significant mass storage in the form of magnetic and optical disks and providing content to users of client computers over a global computer network, a value indicating a guaranteed number of plays is an attribute associated with each media asset. This attribute is used to reserve storage bandwidth so that at any given time, a certain number of simultaneous playouts are available for the requested media asset. For file systems containing the media assets and as referred to herein, storage bandwidth refers to the transmission bandwidth available for transfer of media assets stored on the server computer over a communications medium, such as a network connection. For example, the storage bandwidth for one media asset doubles when it two media assets of the same size are played out simultaneously. A media asset can for example be audio, text, graphics, image, symbol, video, or other information item or token or communication item or method by which information such as audio or visual content is conveyed to a user. As referred to herein, “playout” refers to the streaming or other transfer of the media asset from a server computer to a client computer on which a user views or listens to the media asset. Additionally, the guaranteed number of plays attribute is used to determine the number of copies of the asset required to satisfy the guaranteed number of plays. However, there are limitations associated with utilization of this attribute. As shown in FIG. 1, a significant amount of storage space is wasted with respect to the storage bandwidth utilized for playouts of the ten media assets.
FIG. 1 illustrates utilization of storage space on a server versus storage bandwidth as utilized in conventional media asset delivery systems. In FIG. 1, a user desires a maximum of ten playouts from a set of ten 1 Mbps assets, each of which occupies ten MB of storage space. These playouts could all be from the same asset or from any combination thereof, although the total number of playouts is less than or equal to the ten playouts desired by the user. Typical implementations install each of these assets with ten guaranteed playouts. If these assets are all placed on a single file system with a bandwidth capacity of 100 Mbps and space capacity of 1 GB, then the entire file system bandwidth is consumed and the file system is no longer usable for further asset installations even though only 100 MB of disk space has been used. This is wasteful in terms of file system bandwidth and space.